The Hope Slide/Little Sister

Literature & Fiction

MacLeod, Joan

Dramas & Plays

Talonbooks

A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense personal grief. The warmth and humour of the characters invite us to embrace the situationbe at once moved and threatened by itand to consider how we ourselves would react. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

Amigo's Blue Guitar

Humor & Entertainment

Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1993.

The Hope Slide / Little Sister

In an imaginary letter to an absent older brother, Braidie struggles to understand the torture and killing of a teenage girl by a group of her school-mates. MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the otherof both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence. Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophethe sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow, Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, British Columbia, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.

The Shape of a Girl / Jewel

We, each of us in the civilized Western world, live in a space inviolate. Our home is our castle,” as the saying goes: our shelter from the intrusion of the weather and other outside influences;” our defence against physical and mental threats, real and imagined, to our private space; vault to our accumulated private property; theatre of our desires and aspirations; arena of our private victories and defeats, no matter how large or small; harbour of our secrets and fears; refuge to our children and family. Yet the very protection and security our home provides us with also isolates us from our neighbours, our relatives, and the public affairs of our communitiesconstructs a garrison of anonymity around us and our loved ones in which we can become unknown, unlovedno one that anyone need be concerned nor care about. We see the recent rise of home invasions in our society as a violation of our most intimate places: the perpetration of heinous crimes upon the aged, the disabled, the helpless, victimizing our citizens precisely where rules of hospitality and generosity should govern our social relations. All this and more is the subject of Joan MacLeod’s perceptively poignant play, Another Home Invasion, where another” carries both its meanings: something commonplace; and something of an entirely different kind and nature. Of course this play involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to find there, but is he the real threat to the home’s occupants? He even shows up for a return visit. Who, then, are the real perpetrators of the heartless betrayal of the elderly couple who lives here: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their familytheir home? The answers to these questions are as surprising as they are unsettling.

Another Home Invasion

Inspired by the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, The Valley dramatizes the volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. The play connects both sides of this relationship by portraying two families embattled with depression, each guided by good intentions but challenged by their own flawed humanity. Joan MacLeod is the author of numerous award-winning plays. Her work has been translated into more than eight languages with productions throughout the world, including a sold-out run in New York.

The Valley

Amigos Blue Guitar

Blizzard Pub Ltd

CETTE FILLE-LA

DRAMATURGES

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Books by MacLeod, Joan